THE X FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE (aka THE X FILES: THE MOVIE)

Season Five of the phenomena which was The X Files concluded with and episode entitled “The End”. Season Six would open with “The Beginning” but somewhere in the middle and for some reason, money presumably, it was considered to be a good idea to make a franchise movie during the series’ run. The X Files would continue for another four years so what have we got here?

We have a theatrical episode of a series which was embroiled in a massive and complex plot about alien colonisation and the world’s government’s secret involvement of which. So, we have a beginning but how does it end? Well, if it ends and serves as a conclusion to the previous five years worth of narrative, then where do you go from there? This cannot end, even though it is a theatrical film.

It therefore becomes a big budget episode, for the hard-core fans only. The show was at its height during 1998 and there’s was no stopping it. This film was misjudged, though that’s to say it was bad. It wasn’t. It was perfectly decent as a feature-length episode and plays out well, as well as moving Mulder and Scully’s will they or won’t they relationship on with a nice tease.

Star Trek had succeeded with its features, namely because at first, it was a way of rejuvenating the franchise and then with The Next Generation, they waited until the show had finished, there by allowing anything to happen. They owed nothing to the show could now take the characters and situations almost anywhere.

This is not the case with The X Files: Fight The Future, where this movie was a small cog an a massive machine. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut would go on to succeed where this film had failed by actually taking the show in more satirical direction, which caught on and the show is now better for it. This film may have had more success if it had done what the sequel did a decade later and have a stand alone story but the fans didn’t want that, but I doubt that they wanted this either.

Overall though, a decent enough X File, but a poor feature film in its own right.